Monday 11 May 2015
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Wednesday 6 May 2015
The Solipsistic Palimpsest: tautologising absence and the power of an image to refer to nothing
An image's reference is constitutively ambiguous by dint of the fact
that the image is itself discrete. Its ontological limitation – its
definition – constitutes it as a thing in itself and, therefore, as
radically separate from whatever it may be said to refer to.
This gap or elementary difference is even present in
non-representational (abstract) art where the object exists
simultaneously as its substance and its own image but the two modes
of existence (as evidenced through reproduction) can never be wholly
identified with each other.
An image, therefore, is in self-referential relation to itself as
object as well as to any object it might reference by representation.
The object is mute – even objects that are digitally constituted
are mute to the point that their materiality is defined by a
structural relationship physically describable without recourse to
referencing the image or its content – this content being the
referential field of the work itself.
If the image has phenomenological existence it is though referencing
power – a power that includes the image itself but not the
materiality that grounds it – the physical description of which is
most comprehensively achieved without reference to the image as
image (as referentiality).
Sunday 3 May 2015
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